Spotlights, high-tech security cameras, miles of chain-link fences secured with giant padlocks, armed guards, ferocious security dogs—all go a long way toward making each of us feel good about our water system’s security.
However, one of the greatest potential threats to our nation’s drinking water supply often goes overlooked and has proven time and again that even the highest fences and latest spy gadgets can’t stop it.
What is this threat you might ask? It is none other than the myriad of pollutants that often go unnoticed—abandoned dumps, forgotten storage tanks and other byproducts of our nation’s growth.
These unseen antagonists have the ability to infiltrate our water supply and threaten the very health of our customers, making it imperative that every water system take a proactive approach to protecting our water supplies from the very beginning—the source.
In this issue of the Safe Drinking Water Trust eBulletin we’ll take a look at how to implement a source water protection (SWP) program that will not only protect your water supply, but will give you a chance to involve the very people that you serve each and every day.
Source-Water Protection Begins at Home.
When you boil it down, source water-protection is simply preventing the polluting of the lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater that make up our nation’s source of drinking water. It’s just good ol’ common sense packaged in an organized manner.
A good SWP program, as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency, will target key areas in need of additional protection and will typically involve the following steps:
• Delineating source water protection areas (Mapping where the water your system treats comes from).
• Conducting a Contaminant Source Inventory (Determining potential pollution sources that could impact your drinking water supply).
• Susceptibility Determinations (Calculating the risk posed by each identified source of pollution).
• Planning for the future (Taking the necessary steps to ensure that you are able to provide a safe supply of drinking water, today, and in the future).
The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) Amendments of 1996 required states to develop and implement Source Water Assessment Programs (SWAP).
Under this program, state primacy agencies were charged with analyzing existing and potential threats to the quality of the public drinking water throughout the state and creating individualized source water assessments.
While the SWAP programs are a great resource, for local SWP programs to be effective they must be supported at the community level.
Unlike the state assessments, local source water protection programs are voluntary, and highly recommended.
On the downside, this means that communities and water systems together have the right, and all too often choose, to wait until they face a specific water quality threat before developing a program. However, waiting until problems occur could put your customers at risk.
Implementing a program now not only protects your most valuable asset, your customers—it could also save you a great deal of money in the long run.
Additional Resources
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/source/contacts.html [1]
Learn From History. Don’t Repeat it!
Source water protection programs are designed to safeguard community water supplies and may in fact be the oldest community-based environmental initiative in recorded American history.
Proclamation for Jamestown, Virginia, signed by Governor Gage in 1610:
“There shall be no man or woman dare to wash any unclean linen, wash clothes,…nor rinse or make clean any kettle, pot or pan, or any suchlike vessel within twenty feet of the old well or new pump. Nor shall anyone aforesaid within less than a quarter mile of the fort, dare to do the necessities of nature, since these unmanly, slothful, and loathsome immodesties, the whole fort may be choked or poisoned.”
Since the importance of protecting public water sources wasn’t lost on our forefathers, it’s safe to say that it shouldn’t be lost on modern water treatment systems either.
Failure to heed the example set by our forefathers could potentially have a large impact on your system’s pocketbook through increased treatment costs, the cost of establishing a new water supply, additional staff wages, state and federal fines, and even litigation.
More than a decade ago, Montgomery County, Maryland, officials assured residents that the nearby county-operated landfill would never pollute their drinking water supply. In fact, county officials were so confident of this that they promised to give residents 50 years of free water if their wells became contaminated.
Around 1991, low levels of trichloroethylene, or TCE, and Freon were detected in wells near the landfill. The county was quickly sued, and under the terms of a settlement was ordered to spend roughly $3 million to extend water lines to 145 houses plus $45,000 a year to provide them with free water until the year 2045.
Don’t let a similar incident happen in your community.
Have questions about creating a source-water protection program for your water system? Then check out our Ask-An-Expert resource found along the left side of the screen for assistance in your area. Or click here to request further assistance: Ask-An-Expert.
Additional Resources
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/protect.html [2]
Delineating (Mapping) Problem Areas.
For each ground water well or surface water intake that supplies public drinking water, the land area that could potentially contribute water, and pollutants, to the water supply must be delineated, or mapped.
This step in establishing a SWP program should have already been completed for public water system’s by the state primacy agency as part of the SWAP program.
Tip: Use this link to access SWAP Contacts in Your State.
It is important that each water system review the state-supplied assessment for their system to determine if any sources of potential threats have been overlooked.
Some states approach the mapping process by simply drawing a circle of a certain radius around known water supply sources, others use a more complex formula to identify source protection areas. For systems that rely on surface water from a stream, river, lake, or reservoir, the land area in the watershed upstream of the intake is generally identified on the map as your source protection area.
Once the mapping process has been completed, it is up to individual communities and treatment systems to design and implement a comprehensive SWP program to protect the critical areas that have been identified around your water source.
Additional Resources
http://water.montana.edu/training/swp/il/default.htm [3]
Picking Your Neighbor’s Brain.
Community groups and your very own customers are a great resource that can be tapped when completing the second step in designing a source water protection plan—conducting a contaminant source inventory to identify potential sources of pollutants that could contaminate your water supply.
The inventory will result in a list of facilities and activities within your protection area that have the potential to release contaminants into the ground water supply (for wells) or the watershed of the river or lake (for surface water sources).
Examples of Point Sources: Contaminants that are released from a specific, known source.
• Industrial point discharges, as well as leaks of industrial chemicals
• Municipal wastewater effluents
• Landfill sites
• Wastes from existing and abandoned mining sites
• On-site septic systems
• Underground storage tanks
Examples of Nonpoint Sources: Contaminants that are often diffused in nature making them difficult to locate.
• Agricultural activities
• Urban runoff from buildings, streets and sidewalks
• Pesticides
• Road salting
Once potential sites for contamination have been identified, they should be placed on your system’s assessment map indicating their location in relation to your water supply.
Community groups and local individuals (don’t rule out the help of customers and other civic groups) are a great resource and can often provide valuable information such as the location of abandoned dump sites, businesses with septic tanks or floor drains such as dry cleaners or auto repair shops, pesticide mixing sites, or other sites that could potentially release pollutants into ground or surface water sources.
Additional Resources
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/protect/feddata/inventory.html [4]
Determining the Risk.
Once a contaminant source inventory has been completed and the results mapped, the next step is to rank potential risks to your water system.
Potential sources of pollution should be assigned susceptibility rankings of high, medium or low based on the level of potential risk they pose.
For example, if agriculture only comprises a small fraction of the total area of a source water protection area, then the risk posed by fertilizers, pesticides and many other kinds of agricultural contamination may be minimal.
On the other hand, if urban development is predominant, risks associated with urban runoff, chemical and fuel storage and septic systems will be priorities. This ranking will allow you to determine where to focus your efforts as you look to protect your water source.
Additional Resources
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/protect/feddata/susceptibility.html [5]
Planning for the Future.
Whether using the state-supplied source water assessment or expanding it into a more detailed local assessment as explained here, communities and water systems shouldn’t just place the information on a shelf. Instead, it should be used to create and implement a broader SWP program.
Community groups and local officials, working in cooperation with local, regional and state government agencies can plan how to best manage the potential contamination sources that have been identified and prevent new contamination threats in the source water assessment area.
Tip: Check out this month’s SDWT eBulletin Success section for helpful hints on creating community planning teams to assist in this process.
One management option that may be utilized involves the support of, or implementation of, municipal regulations, such as prohibiting or restricting land uses that may release contaminants in critical source water areas.
These regulations can include:
• Zoning Ordinances – To divide a municipality into land-use districts and separate incompatible land uses such as residential, commercial and industrial zones. Appropriate zoning regulations can be used to regulate or prevent activities that could be harmful to the communities’ water source.
• Subdivision Ordinances – Applied when a piece of land is actually being divided into lots for sale or development to ensure that growth doesn’t outpace the communities’ services. These ordinances can be used to set density standards, require open space set-asides, and regulate the timing of development, all of which can have significant impacts on ground-water quality.
• Source Prohibitions – To prohibit the storage or use of dangerous materials in a protection area.
While it can often be difficult to convince community leaders of the need to pass additional regulations, water systems can utilize other tools in their effort to protect water sources including:
• Working with Facilities to Reduce Potential for Pollution – Federal and state laws regulate discharges into the environment, but if a facility has been identified as a high threat to your source water, work with those facilities to minimize all permitted discharge and to further measures to prevent spills or releases.
• Public Education – To build community support for regulatory programs and to motivate voluntary source water protection efforts, such as water conservation or household hazardous waste management.
Few people will make changes without understanding what changes need to be made, why change is needed, how to make the change, and how the change will affect them. Educating communities on the importance of source water protection will help introduce a change in behavior and begin a move toward environmental stewardship.
The Cost of Failing to Protect Your Water Source.
To keep water clean, and provide safe drinking water we must all work together to protect our source water supplies. Failure to do so could put your customers at risk and increase the cost of treating your community’s drinking water.
Remember, keeping contaminants from entering source water supply areas is the first barrier in the multiple-barrier approach to protecting drinking water quality.
Clean water requires less treatment—protecting your customers and saving your system valuable resources. It’s a sure bet that the cost of developing and implementing a SWP program will far outweigh the cost of restoring water quality after the supply has been contaminated.